Phillip Yau Wing-choi, a touring car driver, was killed in a crash during qualifying at the Macau Grand Prix on Friday, one day after motorcyclist Luis Filipe de Sousa Carreira died in an accident on the same track.
The Associated Press reported Yau’s Chevrolet Cruze went wide as it came around the right-hand bend and slammed into the crash barriers on the left side of the track. The car, with its left side crumpled, scraped along the barrier and flames burst out from the bottom.
Race organizers said Yau crashed on the Mandarin Bend at the Guia Circuit. The crash was so bad that rescuers had to cut open the car to remove the Hong Kong driver, he was taken to a nearby hospital but was pronounced dead 27 minutes after arrival.
On Thursday, Carreira was killed at Fisherman’s Bend at the Guia circuit. The Portuguese rider was declared dead about 20 minutes after arriving at the hospital.
”Unfortunately it is not very pleasant to have two accidents in two days,” organizers said. “But every track has challenges and the track of Macau as a street circuit presents challenges that all the drivers have the opportunity to learn.”
Organizers went on to say that Yau was an experienced Macau racer who had won two races at the track. Carreira was competing for his seventh time in the bike race at Macau.
In the wake of the two deaths at the track, organizers maintain that the street circuit is still safe and do not plan to cancel any remaining weekend events.
“I don’t think there is any question about the track; it has existed as it is for 60 years,” race coordinator Joao Manuel Costa Antunes told the South China Morning Post.
The deaths of both racers have been hard for fellow colleagues to grasp.
“It’s been difficult for us losing one of our colleagues,” English motorcyclist John McGuinness said. “It’s one of those things in racing and our hearts go out to the family and friends of Luis Carreira.”
The last death to occur at the track was in 2005, and before that 1994. A tourist was killed in 2000 when a car left the track, according to the South China Morning Post.
